apply(iris[, 1:4], 2, summary)
Nice solution! However, latex(apply(iris[, 1:4], 2, summary)) has the odd effect that the upper left corner is "apply". This is the "title", so to produce a file "abc.tex" and have an empty upper left corner you need latex(apply(iris[, 1:4], 2, summary),title="",file="abc.tex") And, since I wanted a more compact table, the following works just as expected: latex(format(apply(iris[, 1:4], 2, summary),digits=2),title="",file="abc.tex") thank you! Steve